When I first moved to the area in which I live during the mid-90s, there was a multi-restaurant food delivery service. This was long before DoorDash and all the rest, back when orders had to be placed over the phone. They had a limited menu, only a handful of items from each of the restaurants they took deliveries for, and they had a strict no-substitutions policy. There was a $20 minimum order and the delivery fee was a flat $14.95. In other words, they weren’t cheap. You were not going to order a bowl of egg drop soup with a side order of wontons. If you were placing an order with them you were probably planning on feeding your entire family or a group of 4 or more friends. The delivery service did pretty decent business until a hurricane hit the area. Although it was a fairly minor hurricane, as hurricanes go, they never resumed business after the storm.
I say all that to say this. In 1990s dollars they were an expensive service to use. The $20 minimum order is the equivalent of about $33 today. The $14.95 delivery fee is the equivalent of $25 today. That was what it took to have a profitable business and pay the delivery drivers enough for it to be a decent living. Flash forward to today where the average DoorDash delivery driver makes $1.45 an hour after expenses. Today’s gig-economy food delivery services tend to have no minimum order size and delivery fees that are often…
